


Always Alone

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-11 01:29:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13513923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Although he was surrounded by people, Blair was alone.





	Always Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Written for theSentinel Thursday prompt 'flag'

Always Alone

by Bluewolf

Although he was surrounded by people, Blair was alone. It seemed to him that he had always been alone, with nobody to care what happened to him. Academically he was quite sure that his mother loved him, but he had no idea where she was, most of the time.

He was alone; yet, paradoxically, he wasn't lonely. He didn't think he had ever been lonely.

Always alone, but never lonely. He had heard of people being lonely; but he wasn't sure he understood exactly what loneliness was.

There were people all around him... people that he knew. But people he couldn't call 'friend'. Acquaintance, yes; people he was happy enough to spend time with. He treated everyone with a cheerful apparent friendliness that disguised that as far as he was concerned it was always 'out of sight, out of mind'; that there was nobody he would seek out, wanting to spend time with him. Or her.

Blair knew what friendship was. He had encountered friendship in books - indeed, one or two of his books had pages flagged because of the description of the relationship - the friendship - between two of the characters. Sometimes he even went back to those pages and reread them, trying to understand what it was that made those characters 'friends', wanting to spend time together.

And if sometimes he thought he would like to meet someone with whom he could have that kind of relationship - the thought was fleeting, if only because despite the description of friendship in the books, he couldn't understand why two people could want to spend any length of time with each other.

For friendship in real life didn't last. He had seen that so often when he was growing up. His mother had sometimes met someone with whom she had become quite friendly; friendly enough that she had paused in her dedicated wandering of the world and stayed with him - or occasionally her - for a while. But the friendship had never lasted. Sometimes Naomi left; sometimes whoever she had moved in with asked - or even told - her to leave after a few weeks.

Blair had been young enough, the first time, not to have developed a close attachment to anyone, though he had been sorry to say goodbye to the family dog; but he had remembered, thereafter, to keep everyone, including any pets, at arm's length.

But he had also learned to keep a certain emotional distance from his mother, who had several times left him with an older woman she had told him was his grandmother, while she went off to someplace where children were not welcome.

Certainly Gran had seemed to like him, and he was fond enough of her, but he had no illusions. He was quite sure she was glad when Naomi reappeared to take him away. And when the day came that Naomi told him he would not be staying with Gran again, he just knew it was because she had told Naomi not to leave him there again. He was ten.

A few years later - just before he went to Rainier - he mentioned Gran to Naomi, and that was when he learned that no, she hadn't said she didn't want him; she had died.

Blair thought about it for a while that night before he fell asleep. So - even if someone was happy enough to know him, he or she might die, and that was a sort of abandonment; not a deliberate decision, but it still meant he would never see that person again.

But why - why - hadn't Naomi told him, when she said he wouldn't be staying with Gran again, that it was because she had died? Did Naomi think he would find it easier if he wasn't told Gran had died? If he thought she just didn't want him?

Well, he would never know, because even if he asked her Naomi wouldn't give him a straight answer. "I thought you were too young to be told, Sweetie," she would say. That had been her stock answer any time he'd ever asked anything about things that happened before he went to Rainier. But those years, when she claimed she thought him 'too young' to understand anything, had taught him self-sufficiency; how to be content with his own company.

It made him wonder... what had happened to make Naomi leave home and wander the world the way she did, apparently trusting nobody? His memories of Gran were not of someone who was hard to live with.

But that wasn't something Naomi would ever tell him; he knew that.

His years at Rainier were happy enough. One lecturer - Eli Stoddard - seemed to like him, and he liked Stoddard. But the professor-student relationship came into play; there was no way they could have anything other than a professional relationship. In any case, at the end of Blair's second year at Rainier, Stoddard left to devote his time to studying the handful of true stone-age tribes that were left in a few undeveloped parts of the world. Blair found himself missing the older man, but accepted that this was just another case of someone who no longer wanted to know him.

And then Blair met Jim Ellison... and almost overnight, his attitude towards the world changed. It wasn't just that Jim was a sentinel - it was Jim himself.

Yes, Blair accepted that Jim was repressed, sometimes bad-tempered, often totally unappreciative of the things Blair (much to his own surprise) tried to do for him - but he also quickly realized that there was nothing Jim wouldn't do for him. Not after Blair's warehouse home blew up and Jim gave him a bed 'for a week'. Once he had returned Larry to the biology department, Jim told him he was welcome to stay.

One evening, when he was on his own in the loft, Jim being tied up at the PD at a meeting, Blair pulled out the books where he had flagged the pages on friendship and reread them - and knew that he had indeed found the treasure he had, for so long, refused to believe existed.

He had found someone he wanted to spend time with; someone who wanted to spend time with him... with neither of them putting a price on what they each offered the other.

He had found a friend.

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually a sort of extension of a passing paragraph in my story 'Once Bitten', written in 2010.


End file.
